Surface mount supplies carrier tape or component carrier tape is used to transport components (e.g., electrical components such as resistors, capacitors, or integrated circuits) from a component manufacturer to a different manufacturer that assembles the components into new products, typically by having automated assembly equipment sequentially remove components from the carrier tape and assemble them into to the new products. Such carrier tape is a polymeric strip that has been formed to have wall portions defining a series of identical pockets at predetermined uniformly spaced intervals along its length, which pockets are shaped to closely receive identical components the tape is adapted to transport (e.g., which pockets could, for example, have rectangular or generally "I" or "T" shapes in the plane of the strip, and could have flat or rounded bottoms to accommodate the shape of the components), which strip normally also has through openings uniformly spaced along one side to receive a drive sprocket by which the strip can be driven and to provide indexing holes that can be used for accurately locating the pockets along the tape with respect to assembly equipment. Typically, the carrier tape is manufactured in a first manufacturing location, wound on a reel and transported to the supplier of the components it is intended to transport. The component supplier unwinds the carrier tape from the reel, fills the pockets along the carrier tape with components, adheres a removable cover strip along the carrier tape over the component filled pockets, winds the component filled carrier tape with the attached cover strip onto a different typically smaller reel, and sends it to the user who feeds it from the reel into the assembly equipment which removes the components.
An industry standard dictates that the carrier tape must have less than 1 millimeter non cumulative camber over a length of 250 millimeters. This means that when the carrier tape is unwound from the reel on which it is shipped to the component supplier and disposed on a planar surface, its elongate edges must not deviate from being straight by more than 1 millimeter in any 250 millimeter length of the carrier tape. The component tape can easily be made to meet this specification. When the component tape is wound around a reel directly upon itself with the edges of all the wraps in a single plane for shipment to the component supplier (called "planetary winding" in the industry) it will remain generally as straight as it was when it was manufactured. Such planetary wound reels are limited in the amount of component tape they can hold, however. Thus more than one year prior to Mar. 14, 1990, the filing date of the parent application Ser. No. 07/493,440, eight millimeter wide component tape shipped to component suppliers has been supplied level wound edge to edge on reels with 203.2 millimeter (8 inch) outside diameter cores and a width (i.e., 76.2 millimeter or 3 inch) between opposed flanges on the reel that was significantly greater than the width of the carrier tape (i.e., the component carrier tape was helically level wound around the 203.2 millimeter (8 inch) diameter peripheral surface of the hub in layers with the wraps of carrier tape in each layer being disposed edge to edge so that those wraps are displaced axially from each other by the width of the carrier tape, and with the the opposite edges of wraps of carrier tape in successive layers being angled in opposite directions with respect to the axis of the hub). It has been found, however, that carrier tape supplied in this manner will not consistently meet the camber specification noted above, (even though the carrier tape as originally manufactured met that specification), and thus such level winding has not been commercially successful.